1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a remote vehicle management system, and more specifically to using video radar so as to improve the efficiency of vehicle management, and prevent any possible human mistakes.
2. The Prior Art
Recently, telematics has been a hot topic in the vehicle industry around the world. However, owing to limited bandwidth available, it is substantially constraint to respond to actual scene in real time as required by automatic remote management.
Additionally, remote management for cars or vehicles strongly depends on wireless communication technology, but only little amount of information can be smoothly transferred through current wireless channel with limited bandwidth resource, such as Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinate, part of videos or scaled down videos. Therefore, the driver of the vehicle still needs to send back some real time information to the remote control center through mobile phone or radio handset for correct determination by the operator of the remote control center, and then the operator takes suitable measures, like issuing command or remotely controlling the vehicle.
One of the shortcomings in the prior arts is that the remote control center can not always keep track of the current location of the vehicle, and especially can not constantly and smoothly receive the videos desired, if the GPS function fails or radio communication quality deteriorates. Furthermore, the driver fails to regularly report the current situation if the connection with the vehicle is lost, the vehicle is stolen, or the driver abruptly faints or gets hurt due to traffic accident, or even carelessly forgets. At this time, the operator can not correctly determine what happens to the vehicle. Another problem is that if the vehicle runs in a wrong route but the driver still reports normal situation, the remote control center can not further examine the truth.
The operator of the remote control center generally has to view the current or recorded videos around the vehicle to definitely manage the vehicle. However, wireless bandwidth is limited such that it is very difficult to receive successive videos used to monitor the traffic situation without missing some videos or to make sure that every cargo is in right location of the vehicle. Instead, it is usual to transfer a smaller portion of videos previously compressed from the original videos, or just a local part of the videos, or some intermittent videos at a specific period. As a result, the received videos may be obscure, damaged or even lost.
However, it is apparent for the remote management application that the wireless bandwidth still becomes insufficient in the upcoming future regardless of how the wireless technology is improved because of huge amount of videos to be transferred. And, the vehicle easily loses the connection with remote control center.
The present technology can only provide limited information for communication, such as the location in the satellite map, the smaller or intermittent video for the current environment, radio communication or mobile phone information, so video information is strongly needed to precisely capture real situation. In general, the video information basically consists of an extremely huge volume of color data corresponding to millions of pixels, and it also takes a lot of resources to transfer. Moreover, it still needs to manually identify the objects present in the video information. Even if a person can afford to watch or examine 4 videos at a time, the ability of perception and determination still seems insufficient and may decay over time. For example, there is a train with 8 railway carriages, each equipped with one camera to capture the surrounding video, so the person has to constantly watch and examine 8 videos from 8 cameras. For 2 trains, there are 16 videos. As a result, it is an intense challenge to simultaneously capture all the videos and quickly identify the possible problem. Especially, it usually takes hours of manpower to examine the successive videos to identify a single event.
Therefore, it is greatly desired to provide a remote vehicle management system by video radar, which employs videos recognition technology to identify any target object in the video, and then transfers a little amount of information with easily understood text or icons to indicate the actual traffic situation to the remote device, thereby solving the above problems in the prior arts.